The public image of the Porsche 911 knew its heyday in the 1980s, when they appeared to come free with jobs in advertising. But even today, the sight of its rear grille slicing past you in the fast lane or cutting you up on a roundabout can induce a nostalgic burst of bitterness and resentment in other road users.
Now Porsche has revived the Targa version, after a three-year break in production, this time basing it on the Carrera coupé version of the car and not, as before, on the cabriolet. What separates the Targa from the other 911s in the Porsche range is the enormous piece of glass in its roof. And what separates the glass from the roof is a button on the dashboard, which, with a smoothness and silence that Batman could only dream of, slides the entire panel over your head and tucks it under the back window.
At this point, your visibility in the rear-view mirror, through two sets of thick, tinted glass, is reduced almost to zero. But what the heck, because you pretty much know already what's behind you: people making "wanker" gestures and getting smaller very quickly. And above you there is now a square mile of blue sky, weather permitting.
Essentially, the 911 Targa is the world's fastest conservatory - a bright place to relax in when the afternoon sun comes round, but also somewhere that can be thrown open to the air during heatwaves. And driving it with the roof back is a marvellously uncomplicated and unstressful experience: no buzz from the bodywork; no buffeting winds threatening to puncture the eardrums; just the swish of air passing above and the rich Teutonic rumble of the engine.
Of course, the purist would argue that the very point of open-top driving is to put your head in a place where the wind can tear the skin off your forehead, and as such he or she may find the snugness of the open Targa, even at high speeds, unrefreshing. But for the less hardy, the vehicle offers a handy compromise: a sense of being outdoors in a very fast car, without the disadvantage of having to go back along the road and look for your hair afterwards.
Another dashboard button unfurls and retracts a black roller blind across the roof glass. This isn't simply there to thwart voyeurs in helicopters; it's there to provide some insulation in the winter. It can also - as I discovered to my cost - play a valuable shade-giving role in the summer. I left the car in the sun for half an hour with the blind back, and returned to find tomato-growing conditions in the cockpit. It took about 15 minutes, with the air conditioning going at full blast, to remove the fug.
Because you are carrying a large Velux window around where the roof ought to be, the car is inevitably heavier than the Porsches with conventional tops. Theoretically, this makes it slower, though you would need to have a particularly fine stopwatch to appreciate the difference. The official figures suggest that, at 5.2 seconds, the Targa is a mere 0.2 seconds slower than the Carrera 2 coupé in reaching 62mph - a time lapse that would ruin your day if you were Michael Schumacher, but is hardly going to have anybody else slamming their hands against the steering wheel in frustration. What's more, in the Targa, with its 3.6-litre, flat-six engine, you can be up to 124mph in 18.3 seconds - and travelling home with no licence in the back of a police traffic control car approximately 3.5 minutes after that.
The 911's chief rival at the price is probably the Honda NSX, to which we warmed on these pages recently. But you can't do anything nearly as snazzy with the roof on the Honda. Neither could you get four people inside it, except possibly for charity. The Targa, on the other hand, has two rear seats hollowed into the fabric under its eaves. I don't suppose that someone the size of Shaquille O'Neal would want to sit in them - certainly not on longer journeys. But for children of primary-school age, they offer highly acceptable seating in an excitingly den-like environment.
There's even room for some luggage. Not wishing to let the roof pane steal all the glory, the rear window pops open at the flick of a button on the key fob, so you can remove bags while maintaining a dignified standing position on the pavement, rather than by getting down on your stomach inside the driver's door and wriggling towards the back of the car like a soldier on an obstacle course.
Like the back seats, the luggage space is Lilliputian by the standards of most conventional automobiles, but even so, these are highly unusual provisions in a vehicle built to burn off the world, and they suggest that what Porsche may ultimately be trying to achieve with the Targa is a unique and highly welcome hybrid: the family racing car.
Up front, both driver and passenger get to recline on business-class seating and run their fingers thoughtfully over a number of soft hide fittings. Every detail, not least the metallic clank that the key makes coming out of the ignition, suggests the patient application of rare craftsmanship - except, oddly, the indicator stalk, which feels like Lego. It explains something that many of us have wondered about since the 1980s: why people in Porsches never indicate.
